The Sydney media regularly pokes fun at mayor Clover Moore's crazy schemes including her community farm at St Peters in the middle of the city that's complete with fruit trees, vegetable gardens, chicken hutches, stingless bees and a bee hotel.
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Her council spent about $2 million to get the venture going with things like landscaping, fencing, cropping areas, orchard and an area for weekly farmers' markets to connect the city with the country.
People grow fresh seasonal produce, take part in workshops, have hands-on sessions with industry experts or learn about sustainability in a series of talks and interact with others who share similar interests.
So with the council undecided what to do with the Summer Street-Woodward Street block of land that people want to retain as some sort of open area we could follow Clover Moore by turning it and our other open plots into community vegetable gardens because there's lots of suitable land that's going to waste.
First there's the roundabouts.
The council could rip out all those flowers and shrubs that block your vision and instead plant lettuces, cauliflowers, carrots and spring onions.
Cook Park is highly suitable to run chickens while the car parks like Woolworths, K-mart and Summer Centre could be turned into revenue raisers with cabbage, corn, pumpkin and celery plots.
The rarely-used Function Centre is a ready-made greenhouse to grow mushrooms, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants. That's a far better idea than it sitting there idle for most of the time.
And there's dozens of kilometres of grass verges in the front of houses that could be used to plant things like spuds, corn and spinach. So Old McClover's Farm could be a winner here. Sort of.
SIMPLE LIFE BEING TARNISHED
It's concerning some insiders claim Parliament House in Canberra has a toxic culture with boozy nights, sex encounters and a high pressure work environment.
The building itself doesn't help because of the long corridors that house offices for lonely and secretive politicians where they and their young twenty-something staffers hide for most of the time until the bells sound a division.
And there's more than just pollies in Parliament House. There's clerks, researchers, journalists, chefs, librarians, guides, electricians, gardeners, plumbers, printers and cleaners who work in the 4,500-room building and grounds.
When parliament sits it's home for 5,000 people, or the combined population of Molong and Blayney, all from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds to keep our democratic heart ticking.
Working there for three years as media officer for the deputy president of the Senate, the best way to get around the maze of corridors, doorways and lifts was to stick small yellow post-it notes on the walls to find the way back to our office.
You lined up at Aussies for a coffee and cup cake for morning tea, had lunch in the cafeteria, had a haircut at Lizzie's, went for a swim in the heated pool or pretended to get fit in the gymnasium.
There was chook feeding for the media out the front every morning and Budget nights the Hyatt Hotel had a menu for 'in-house' service from all-day breakfast to mains of steak or pizza, a wine list and beer.
So life there was pretty simple and it's sad it's being tarnished by a foolish few.
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